New Horizons

While still more than a year away from a flyby of a distant object in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt, the team running NASA’s New Horizons mission is already looking ahead to future extended missions that could include another flyby.

A senior review of NASA’s planetary science missions has concluded the Dawn spacecraft should remain in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres rather than venture to another asteroid as project officials proposed.

Scientists involved with NASA’s New Horizons mission showed off the latest analysis of data collected during the spacecraft’s flyby of Pluto in July, despite “organizational confusion” at the event that mistakenly prevented attendees from initially sharing the results with the public.

A final decision on an extended mission for NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, one that would take it past a small Kuiper Belt object (KBO), won’t come for more than a year, although the project will be taking steps in the coming months to prepare for such a flyby.

New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern is already contemplating a follow-on mission: A Charon lander that could study the surface Pluto’s largest moon while remotely observing the dwarf planet as an orbiter would.

The first set of images and other data collected by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its July 14 flyby of Pluto, returned to Earth July 15, are already causing project scientists to reassess their understanding of the dwarf planet and its moons.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft carried out a flyby of Pluto July 14, collecting images and other data about the distant dwarf planet and its moons that it will spend more than a year returning to Earth.

While New Horizons passed by Pluto this morning, the science team, and the rest of the world, now have to wait the rest of the day to hear back from the spacecraft to find out how well it carried out its flyby.

SpaceNews’ special coverage of New Horizon's history-making Pluto flyby — including an archived liveblog documenting the encounter as it unfolded over four exciting days — is sponsored by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp.

The member of Congress who played the biggest role in getting New Horizons funded and launched paid a visit to the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) on Monday (April 13) to wish the team the best for the upcoming flyby.

A software developer that specializes in astrophysics simulations is hoping to rally support for science and space exploration with its free mobile app, Pluto Safari, which tracks the New Horizons spacecraft as it zooms ever closer the distant dwarf planet.

For Alan Stern, the wait is almost over. On July 14, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, after a journey spanning nearly a decade, will fly past Pluto at 50,000 kilometers per hour, becoming the first spacecraft to make a close approach to this distant world that, for three-quarters of a century, was classified as the ninth planet.